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This review is part of our free offerings to subscribers and visitors. Please consider supporting Film Yap through a paid signup to our Substack to receive all our premium content, now at a huge discount! Get 30% off forever As regular readers of this space know, I soured on Tim Burton about 20 years ago. After years of being one of my favorite filmmakers, constantly seeking out quirky and original fare, he was (imho) lured by the gilded gold of easy Hollywood remakes or adaptations of moldy intellectual properties.

“Being There” was for Peter Sellers like Michael Jordan’s game-winning shot in the 1998 NBA championship: everyone remembers it as his triumphant final moment in the sun, conveniently forgetting the actual, regrettable coda. (The Wizards, MJ?) In Sellers’ case, this was starring in “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu,” a turn he himself dubbed embarrassing, before passing away suddenly in 1980 at the young age of 54. (The less said about 1983’s “Trail of the Pink Panther,” composed entirely of outtakes from Sellers’ previous turns as the wayward Inspector Clouseau, the better.

“Cimarron” was a big-budget effort by RKO Radio Pictures, which was known for producing down-market fare, taking their big swing at prestige filmmaking. It worked, becoming the first Western to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The next would not come until nearly 60 years later with “Dances with Wolves,” followed by “Unforgiven” a couple of years after that. It’s a sprawling story that takes place over the course of more than 40 years, following in the footsteps of pioneer/lawyer/newspaper publisher Yancey Cravat, played by Richard Dix.

“Gloria” is one of those movies that didn’t make a big impression when it came out, but inspired a lot of other movies and has had a lasting impact on pop culture. It’s now out in an excellent Blu-ray issue from Kino Lorber. Gena Rowlands stars as the titular character, a middle-aged gun moll who turns against her mob friends to protect a 6-year-old boy whose entire family they have murdered, and want to finish the job.

"Harry & Son" isn't a great or even particularly good movie. It's very much an "actors' film," more focused on mood, dialogue and moments than any kind of coherent narrative, and suffers because of this. The story of a fractured father-son relationship, it wanders here, wanders there, and winds up right about where we expect it. But the film -- one of six directed by Paul Newman and the only with a screenwriting credit -- has a couple of scenes of absolute pure perfection.

Say what you will about the failings of the Golden Age Hollywood studio system, but I’m perennially amazed at the speed with which they churned out films. Consider “Mrs. Miniver,” a series of newspaper columns in the late 1930s by Jan Struther about a well-to-do British mother. When the U.K. went to war in 1939, so did Mrs. Miniver, and the columns were collected and expanded in a book of the same name.

Many people aren’t even aware that there was a Robert Downey Sr., apart from the obvious fact one must have existed to sire actor Robert Downey Jr., and that he was an active actor and filmmaker himself. Downey (I’ll drop the appellation henceforth for brevity) made a lot of low-budget counterculture films during the 1960s and ‘70s, stuff most people haven’t even heard of but which influenced other filmmakers including Paul Thomas Anderson.

It had been years since I saw “Terms of Endearment” — quite possibly, not since its release four decades ago — and my hazy memory posited it as a good but fairly conventional “women’s picture,” a ‘you’ll laugh, you’ll cry’ sort of affair that is deliberate in its wringing of tears from the audience. Indeed, in the 41 years since its release the movie has become almost a tearjerker cliché, even a source of parody, with its tale of the complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter who comes down with a third-act case of terminal cancer.

This column is free for everyone. If you like what you’re reading, please consider supporting our critics with a subscription to Film Yap, now at a huge discount! Get 30% off forever Alan Alda was as big a television star as there was in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, including directing two TV movies — so the only logical place to go next (at that time) was feature films. “The Four Seasons,” which he also wrote and directed, was a critical and commercial hit but he never really broke out as a movie auteur, though he continued to garner respect as an actor.